Here is the keyboard before the repair. Or actually it's just a similar one. Notice the kitchen studio setup...
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| The Swissonic CK490. In a kitchen. |
The keyboard was actually made by M-Audio, the former Midiman. The same keyboard has been marketed also under the Evolution brand. It's not as good as M-Audio products in terms of quality.
Since it was very light to carry, I used it for practicing quite a lot. At some point the pitch bend wheel stopped working, and the pitch of the whole keyboard became unstable. It was basically unplayable. The potentiometer had clearly given up.
So I decided to repair the wheel. After opening the thing and ripping the wheel out, I noticed it would be hard for me to find a similar linear 10k pot that would fit in. The two important properties were the physical size of the pot and how many degrees the thing rotated. Both would have to be exactly same with the replacement pot...
Don't pay any attention to the tablecloth. Please.
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| The modulation and pitch bend wheels ripped off from the CK490. |
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| Closeup of the pitch bend wheel. |
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| The pitch bend wheel in pieces. |
Both the pitch bend and the modulation wheels used a similar 10k linear pot. After a bit of thinking I decided to use the mod wheel as the pitch bend wheel, and replace the mod wheel with just a normal pot. Since there was no spring in the mod wheel, I took that from the old pitch bend.
It worked great, and the new modulation pot didn't take a long time to get used to. It also looked great, see for yourself!
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| The result looks so f*cking ghetto! |
Some time later, I sold the thing, as I had gathered some better keyboards. I wonder if it's still in use somewhere...
